1948 U.S. Railroad Atlas

The maps reproduced below are from a copy the 1948 edition of Rand McNally & Company's Railroad Atlas of the United States in the webmaster's collection. The maps cover the Lower 48 states and the cities of Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco -- plus a pair of enlargements showing the Hudson Valley and the vicinity of Albany, NY. Alaska and Hawaii weren't part of the United States in 1948, so that probably explains their absence. One oddity worth noting is that Chicago, the railroad capital of the world, didn't get its own city map in this edition.

There are two versions of the maps available for downloading: 16-color GIF format, and 256-color (gray scale) JPEG format. The JPEGs are larger, usually double the kilobyte size of the GIFs, but they show the maps as scanned. In reducing the maps to 16-color GIFs some legibility of the smaller print town names has been lost. These two demo maps of the GIF format map and the JPEG format map should give you a good idea as to the differences between the two. For your convenience the kilobyte size is listed for each of the files.

There are many ways that you can use these maps in your model railroad's design and operation. Over the years your webmaster has used photocopies of the maps for planning his railroad empires. Finally, to save paper, the maps were scanned and a graphics program, such as Paint Shop Pro, was used instead to highlight the railroad's routes on the digital maps. This map of the Bangor & Aroostook gives you an idea of what can be done.

FYI: the Bangor & Aroostook was done using PSP5 (yes, this website has been around for a really long while!). Using the GIF format map of Maine, the webmaster increased the colors to 16 million, selected everything that wasn't white, then used the retouch tool -- set for color to target -- to paint the route (this changes the color of the pixels without destroying town names or mileage info). He then used the color replacer tool to even out the color of the line, replacing the darker shades of red with bright red, and then decreased the colors from 16 million back to 16 before saving it as a new file.

If you are so inclined, you could use sections of a map(s) to make a scenic guide book, employee or public timetables, or even an Official Guide Of The Railways entry for your model railroad empire. Of course, if you'd prefer, you could just sit back and daydream about all the great train trips you could take, if it was still 1948. All aboard!

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